Xapian is an open source search engine library, which allows developers
to add advanced indexing and search facilities to their own applications.
This manual aims to explain how to work on and contribute to Xapian
itself; if you want to use Xapian in your own project, you should look
at our Xapian user manual.

Note

This is very early days for this guide, so please let us know any issues
you spot or how we can improve it in any way. There’s a lot of additional
information about developing for Xapian in the HACKING file in xapian-core
which we hope to move here in future, and in the meantime that’s a good place to
look for information on coding style, writing and running tests, and so on.

The Xapian community typically works “in the open”, via mailing lists and an
IRC channel:

Our mailing lists are open for anyone to
join, although (because we don’t want to relay spam to everyone) if you
aren’t subscribed to the list someone will have to manually approve your
message. Please be patient and don’t resend a message just because it
doesn’t appear right away.

We’re on #xapian on
irc.freenode.net. IRC is a simple text chat system where many members
of the community hang out; although because we’re distributed around the
world, you may not get an instant response. That doesn’t mean we’re
ignoring you, so either hang on for a reply, or you can use the mailing
list instead.